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I think it's certainly where things started out in the UK
and if you trace the history of it; A: it's taken the best
part of a decade to get to where we've got to and there's
all sorts of issues there for changing HE and the speed at
which we move but I think we're in slightly a different
place now and not everybody's in that place but some of the
leading edge institutions are extending on from that kind
of notion of a summative record provided for students when
they graduate and looking to the HEAR as something that is
developed from when the students arrive. So it's got a
formative dimension leading to a final record, that's one
bit and the other bit I think we might, at some point, want
to pick up in more detail is that it's an electronic record
rather than a paper record, though some feedback from the
students says we’d really like the paper.
Okay, well, I think there are a number of dimensions in
that but I think where some of the leading folks are going
is with rethinking the HEAR in terms of a means of
capturing at least those parts of the student experience
that the institution wants to pay attention to and give
recognition to. So that has an academic component. It has a
broader academic component than the transcript tended to
have in that people are interested in forms of assessments
alongside modules and mark information and also in
communicating to a wider audience and a wider set of
stakeholders so not just employers but parents and somebody
said grandparents. What their program of study is about, so
in some institutions we've got colleagues who are writing
plain English program statements, 250 words, what’s this
program really about for a non-HE audience and some people
have found that really tough. So there’s an academic
dimension. Beyond that there's the life wide dimension that
you eluded to in terms of awards, in terms of prizes and in
terms of a third category which is, anything else the
university wants to attest the student has achieved
through. So it's a kind of big open space for negotiation.
Yes, that's true. It's not everything in the students
experience but what that does is it creates a bounded space
but a space for discussion. Interestingly in the UK
context, between student representative bodies often and
the institution and on one side we have perhaps quite
conservative people in the registry who are saying 'do I
want to put my name to that?' and on the other side we have
the students saying 'We're doing lots of stuff. We're doing
volunteering in the community. We've got projects running.
We're running social activities, communities, societies,
clubs. Yes we've got the awards as well'. Sometimes those
are run by the students as well and it has the potential
and again it's happening some places more that others that
the students become much more engaged in the debate about
what learning is and what achievement is and they become
part of the assessment process. So we get into peer
assessment in a much more diverse way beyond the academic
curriculum.
Let's take a couple then. Well maybe we'll take three but
I'll make them quite short. If we take University of
Gloucester and what Gloucester is doing is developing a
model which is about providing a rubric through which
students make claims for achievement supported by evidence
within an extra curricular framework which has contexts for
learning but it also had domains for learning.
It's like a framework of the kind of ingredients that you
have to present with an indication of the number of words
that you have to present. It's actually a means of
developing a simple reflective framework for students to
work within, so interestingly it brings in some of the
personal development planning elements but is part of a
mechanism of claims for recognition and that's about
verification rather than assessment so we have a
verification system in that institution.
I think we've gone in a different direction there, broadly
through the HEAR and in a sense through the extra
curricular awards that now almost every institution in the
UK has got or is in the process of developing, sometimes
around employability, sometimes around volunteering or
social and community engagement out of which employability
falls. And for most institutions, they've not gone for a
grading model or a model which emphasises particular
standards. They've gone for a model which is about a
consistency of engagement so the evidence supports the
claim in that kind of context. There are other models where
people are getting notional credit, not academic credit,
not credit that counts to a degree, where there are some
clearer criteria but in all cases, in almost all cases, we
are not grading. We're not going for different levels of
performance, for a couple of reasons I think, and these are
my reasons, they may not be theirs. One is we have an
anxiety that if we start to offer things at different
levels which in an awards structure might be bronze,
silver, gold, etc. employers will immediately negate the
lower levels just as they negate in some context in the UK,
lower levels of performance in degrees.
[Interviewer] Is this yet another coding system?
It is. It's another means that employers might choose to
use that universities provide to limit the number of people
they would want to consider and in the UK certainly at the
minute there’s a degree of interest in making the most of
the talent that we've got and that has some implications
for social mobility amongst other things. The other thing I
should say in that kind of territory is that the way that
things are being recorded in those institutions that have
just taken this life long and life wide perspective on the
HEAR is we're going for electronic records that build as
the student life cycle develops.
[Interviewer] So how is that not an e-portfolio?
Well, that’s a good question and we had a workshop which
involved employers and academics and somebody from an
e-portfolio strong institution in the UK said 'but that's
just an e-portfolio' and an employer said 'it might be,
providing the e-portfolio is warranted by the institution.
If it's a personal e-portfolio, then it's not the same
thing at all.' Employers in the UK consistently are saying
'we like the notion that the data comes to us with a
university tag on it'. Some e-portfolios in the UK are very
much in that territory, particularly those from a
professional accreditation. Others are much more about
personal development and personal learning space and so people
have made that kind of distinction between the personal
record of the learner, and that’s part of the learner's
experience while a student inside the curriculum and in the
co-curricular areas that the university wants to attest
achievement within and that's not everything and it
shouldn't be everything. So I think the model that we've
got is a kind of institutionally stewarded record but with
the data that’s owned by the student and that can be played
out at the process of application for further study or for
a job in ways which enable the student to control the data
electronically but still make it available to the employer.